November 22, 2016

Samy Kamkar had built a device that is called Poison Tap. It is a Raspberry Pi Zero which plugs into the victims USB port. The device that looks like an Ethernet connection, your computer inherently trusts this connection and this is where the exploit starts.

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emulates an Ethernet device over USB (or Thunderbolt)

hijacks all Internet traffic from the machine (despite being a low priority/unknown network interface)

siphons and stores HTTP cookies and sessions from the web browser for the Alexa top 1,000,000 websites

exposes the internal router to the attacker, making it accessible remotely via outbound WebSocket and DNS rebinding (thanks Matt Austin for rebinding idea!)

installs a persistent web-based backdoor in HTTP cache for hundreds of thousands of domains and common Javascript CDN URLs, all with access to the user’s cookies via cache poisoning

allows attacker to remotely force the user to make HTTP requests and proxy back responses (GET & POSTs) with the user’s cookies on any backdoored domain

does not require the machine to be unlocked

backdoors and remote access persist even after device is removed and attacker sashays away

November 18, 2016

Kurzgesagt has released a great video that explains Fusion Energy. At this time Fusion Energy is not practicable as an energy source but after Elon Musk is done with kitting out the Gigafactory he has the deep enough pockets that could toy with Fusion Energy.

In most large scale commercial programs, heat from neutron scattering in a controlled reaction is used to operate a steam turbine that drives electric generators. Many fusion concepts are under investigation. The current leading designs are the tokamak and inertial confinement by laser. As of January 2016, these technologies were not viable, as they cannot produce more energy than is required to initiate and sustain a fusion reaction.”

October 3, 2016

SomethingUnreal has built a simple system to demonstrate how a PID Motor Speed Controller works. The system is spinning a piece of cardboard on a toy DC motor. The motor is powered by an H Bridge. An optical sensor provides feedback to the system so that it can see the actual speed and adjust the H Bridge accordingly. The software running on the PC is very nice as it allows for lots of variable playing and graphical output so you can see what the system is doing.

June 7, 2016

Bil Herd goes through a great Introduction to Analog to Digital Conversion. These days it is very simple to grab an analog reading and use it with a microcontroller with ease. This is because modern microcontrollers often have one or many ADC built in. Not that long ago a would have been needed, this is still the case if a special ADC is needed for things such as high precision or very fast acquisition. Below you can see some items from the Microchip PIC 16 line of microcontrollers. This is just showing about a 5th of the available chips that can do ADC and it is sorted from cheapest to most expensive. Doesn’t take long looking at this chart to see that you can really get some big bang for the buck here. In volume the PIC 16F18323 will cost about $0.57 and this 14 pin count chip will give you 11 ADC inputs at a max resolution of 10 bits.

May 28, 2016

With the adoption of IOT long runtime on battery power is something that is a huge concern. We don’t mind charging our smartphones daily but if we have a dozen IOT devices in our home we would like them to be invisible and just operate for as long as possible without needing attention. Andreas Spiess has done some research using the popular ESP8266 and a variety of batteries. In his test he was sending data to an IOT database every 2 minutes but for many cases you may only need the device to wake and transmit once per hour, this would greatly extend the battery life.

May 22, 2016

It is that time again! There is a new batch of Cornell University ECE 5760 Advanced Microcontrollers Final Projects. If you have done any PID work in the past the FPGA controlled Magnetic Levitation by Gautham Ponnu, Ryan Land, Nathan Spallone should be of interest. They are using a Altera DE2-115 FPGA board to monitor and control a steel ball about 1mm above the position sensor with great accuracy.
“The LDC1000 inductive sensor from Texas Instruments. This device acts as a mini “metal detector” and tells us, albeit in a nonlinear fashion, the height of the ball. The output is nonlinear because it is measuring the presence of metal through inductance, not the direct elevation of the ball from the sensor.”

February 15, 2016

If you have ever installed MPLAB on your development machine you know how heavy this software is. Microchip has now given you a nice light weight option. MPLAB Xpress Cloud-based IDE is now available and will let you get up and running in no time.

Thanks for the tip James.

“MPLAB Xpress is a perfect starting point for new users of PIC Microcontrollers – no downloads, no machine configuration, and no waiting to get started on your system development.

MPLAB Xpress incorporates the latest version of MPLAB Code Configurator, which enables users to automatically generate initialization and application C code for 8-bit Microcontrollers using a graphical interface and pin map.

With massive amounts of storage available to users, you can store your current projects in the Cloud. The Community feature allows you to share your ideas with others, or gain inspiration from the shared code repository.

Best of all, MPLAB Xpress IDE is FREE, and can be accessed from any Internet-connected PC or Mac, anywhere in the world.”